Upcoming Book Readings & Events

A full panel of all the editors !
The Cacophony Society, at its zenith, hosted chapters in over a dozen major cities, and influenced much of what was once called the underground, going on to influence a range of art and activities including Burning Man, SantaCon, and Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, amongst other things. Learn the vivid history of this eccentric amalgamation with the lushly beautiful, Tales of the San Francisco Cacophony Society and Cacophonists Carrie Galbraith, Kevin Evans, and John Law.

Main auditorium
1) Cacophony Presentation at SFAI includes a rich slide presentation and talk by Tales of the San Francisco Cacophony Society co-authors Carrie Galbraith and John Law on Cacophony, the Suicide Club and related groups over the course of 30 years.
2) Artist and Cacophonist Wiston Smith will recount a tale from his pranking days with the group.

3) SFAI’s Mark Van Proyen will then moderate a discussion with the authors and field questions from the audience.

Your city is a stage. A canvas. A playground. It’s a veritable dog run of overextended metaphors.
No one understood this better than the Cacophony Society. At the tail end of the 20th century, this ad hoc group of San Francisco pranksters refused to live boring lives. They climbed bridges, hosted dinner parties in tunnels, and mobbed the streets — always running against the crowd, usually dressed up in oversized salmon costumes.
Their exploits directly inspired Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club. They took Burning Man to the Nevada Desert. And perhaps most importantly, their way of thinking, that desire to build your own life and make your own fun directly inspired a global network to do the same.
For the first time, the brand new Tales of the San Francisco Cacophony Society documents the secret history of the most influential underground cabal you’ve never heard of. The lavishisly illustrated, luridly designed book assaults readers with exploits and lore. It’s more than a book; it’s a brick to shatter your ideas of what you can do in a city.
Tonight’s panel features Tales of the San Francisco Cacophony Society co-authors John Law and Carrie Galbraith, along with Charlie Todd, whose Improv Everywhere carries on the spirit of early Cacophony pranks, and Ida Benedetto, co-founder of Wanderlust Projects, who’s organized games in the Brooklyn’s abandoned Domino Sugar factory. Trying to make sense of it all is moderator Jeff Stark, editor and publisher of the underground newsletter Nonsense NYC, who says the Cacophony Society ruined his life — and he wasn’t even a member.

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[/pl_alertbox]Nonsense NYC presents:John Law: Scaling Big Bridges
John Law is obsessed with bridges. He’s studied them, written about them, and worked on them. And he’s climbed them. A lot of them. Without permission.
Law is an adventurer. An urban explorer before anyone had heard of the term. He started climbing bridges with the Suicide Club in San Francisco in the mid 1970s and continued with the Cacophony Society in the 1980s and 1990s. Along the way, he scaled massive spanners around the world, including every major bridge in New York. And he took his camera.
Law’s lecture tonight features spectacularly lucky photography to accompany his amusing, improbable, and occasionally harrowing tales. He’ll explain what it took to finally get up the Verrazano-Narrows, why he ran the Brooklyn Bridge cables in a Santa suit, and why he no longer climbs the Golden Gate. He’ll talk about his book of short stories, The Space Between (Furnace Press, 2009), and share exploits recorded in his newest book, Tales of the San Francisco Cacophony Society (Last Gasp, 2013).
Whether you’re an armchair adventurer or a seasoned explorer, Law’s inspiring talk will change the way you see the city.

Commonwealth Club at the Castro Theater: Chuck Palahniuk and the SF Cacophony Society: Creating Culture from Mayhem

Ever wonder how Chuck Palahniuk came up with the idea for Fight Club’s secret society of recreational fighters? Or how a giant wooden “man” ended up on fire, inspiring one of the world’s most radical gatherings? Welcome to the Cacophony Society, an underground group of pranksters whose culture-jamming antics have shaped the contemporary zeitgeist for the past three decades. Now, from Flash Mobs and SantaCon to groups like Improv Everywhere and the Yes Men, new generations of instigators are taking a page out of the Cacophony book, driving pranks and events with social media tools. Join us as Society founders, celebrated members and those they’ve influenced take us through the origins of Cacophony, the importance of play in adult life, and how to kick-start your own culture.

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The history of the most influential underground cabal you’ve never heard of

Rising from the ashes of the mysterious and legendary Suicide Club, the Cacophony Society, at its zenith, hosted chapters in over a dozen major cities, and influenced much of what was once called the underground.
The Cacophony Society’s epic exploits radically changed the way people live and play in the world.
The group inspired Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club and Burning Man and helped start pop culture trends including flash mobs, urban exploration, and culture jamming.
A large-format, full-color, hardbound homage to this protean group, Tales of the San Francisco Cacophony Society is packed with original art, never before published photographs, original documents and incredulous news accounts.
“Before the Internet vomited headlines by the millisecond and turned the minutia of a million boring Facebook lives into news, we were left the privilege of mystery.
This was something The San Francisco Cacophony Society gave me in spades. Over the years, I would catch glimpses, collect pieces of a puzzle I was slowly assembling—a car crushed flat by an earthquake miraculously tooling down Golden Gate, toasters glued to buildings, news-clips of mock protests and costumed impostors, flyers for strange art spectacles.
Now the puzzle is assembled in this gorgeous graphic collection, a book every lover of eccentricity and enemy of the status quo should enjoy.” – Margaret Cho